POSTED: March 23rd 2011

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NEIL WILSON: Why yet another British world bid risks ending in tears

THE NEIL WILSON COLUMN / An exclusive, authoritative series from Sports Features Communications

LONDON, Mar 24: Three of the four cities which have indicated that they will bid to host the IAAF’s World Athletics Championships in 2015 have been graced already by its major events.

Budapest and Doha each hosted a world indoor championship, Seville, one of Spain’s potential choices, hosted the world championship itself as recently as 1999, and the other, Barcelona, its World Cup.

So that’s it – London’s for the taking. A slam dunk. The vote goes to the one city that has never hosted  because it has never had an arena in which to do so, indoors or out. Now it has, thanks to the votes of IAAF members on the IOC like Lamine Diack to give it the Olympics.

If only it were that simple UK Athletics would be cracking open the bubbly and the others folding their tents before the IAAF  even officially declares the process open on September 1. It isn’t, and certainly not for London, UKA and the British government.

All three have form, as far as the IAAF is concerned. They are serial recidivists, offending the goodwill of the IAAF more often than is wise if you wish to retain integrity in the voting process.

I still have a faded T-shirt proclaiming the 2003 world championships in London, a relic of the campaign backed by the British government which faltered when its Football Association threw out the case for putting a track around the new Wembley Stadium.

Fortunate as it turned out because the stadium was not finished until 2007.

Back came UKA with a bid for 2005, backed by a British government promise to build a different stadium in North London, only for that to collapse when the government reneged.

Future bids

So two down, and after a third embarrassing knock-down on the eve of the vote for the 2015 championship, the IAAF might have thought it would do the UK a kindness by ruling out all future bids.

Instead Diack personally welcomes another for 2017, proving that he is both a glutton for punishment and a shrewd politician who did not wish to be seen taking sides.

His council may be less kind to the British for its past sins when it votes.

Yes, after Beijing in 2015, the IAAF would be following precedent by returning its championship to Europe and asking Doha to come back in 2019. But Barcelona, Seville and Budapest offer viable alternatives to London, alternatives that have never let down the IAAF and have proved by hosting events that they can.

The virgin territory for an IAAF events that London offers may not be a strong enough card when so many jokers already lie on the table.

NEIL WILSON reported his first Olympic Games in Munich in 1972. He has since covered another nine summer and nine winter Olympics for various newspapers, including The Independent and the Daily Mail with whom he has worked for the last 19 years as Athletics and Olympic correspondent. He was Britain's Sports Journalist of the Year in 1984 and is the author of seven books  

Keywords · Neil Wilson · IAAF · Diack · World Athletics Championships · UK Athletics

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